How Do You Actually Tame the Fear of Public Speaking?
A live Threads conversation….
A real conversation about presentation anxiety, the brain, and why affirmations probably aren’t enough
Public speaking anxiety is one of the most common fears around. But most advice on the subject either over-simplifies it or misses the point entirely. This thread started with a simple question and turned into a proper deep-dive.
Here’s the conversation in full.
sherylharold_254 asked:
How do you actually tame the fear of public speaking? Because affirmations don’t seem to work for me.
leejackson replied:
Pro speaker and presentation coach here. If you’d like a copy of my book or audiobook feel free to dm me. There’s a big section in there on presentation anxiety.
miketheschwartz followed up:
Lee, fantastic that you’ve spent time to publish your works. Curious if you’d be willing to sum up where that performance anxiety comes from in a short sentence or two and how you yourself have removed it completely without it ever coming back (if that’s even possible!) from your experience…
leejackson:
Anxiety lives mainly in the small part of our brain called the amygdala that deals with our fight or flight response. Our anxiety stays there – that’s when you get the feeling to leave the room, the feeling to run away. That’s why sometimes our physiology changes, and we get sweaty palms, shaky legs, and we want to run.
One of the main things to do to get rid of our presentation anxiety – or to be honest, we can’t get rid of it, but we can control it and calm it down – we may still get butterflies in our stomach but as someone said, we want them to fly in formation.
So what we should do is start to understand the neuroscience and move our presentation-related anxiety from the amygdala into our prefrontal cortex, which I think is best described as the executive function of our brain. The rational bit. The discussion bit. The bit that regulates our feelings and our emotions. If you’re in the UK I call it the Radio 4 part of our brain – rational discussion and reflection, not the simple fight or flight that’s in the amygdala.
And one of the easiest ways to do that is to understand that our anxiety is the fear of something that has not happened yet. So ask yourself questions that get you out of your head and into the real world.
For example…
Ask yourself really stupid questions. Like: have I ever done a presentation before? Do I know anything about this subject? Am I an expert in the subject? In my case, if I start feeling nervous, and I’m about to deliver a talk on presentation skills, I will literally ask myself very quietly – have you written two books on presentation skills?
Yes I have. Right, so be quiet, shut up and get on with your job!
Sometimes we can be too polite and we can mollycoddle our anxieties.
We should treat our presentation anxiety as the impostor that it is. We shouldn’t be scared of things that haven’t happened. We can use questions which force our brain into a different mode – a pattern interrupt rather than worrying. You can say yes, I’ve done this job for five years, I know what I’m talking about. And that will help us to calm down and help us to start a new process and a new routine next time we speak.
Presentation anxiety makes us feel like little babies with nothing to add, no expertise. The reality is I have seen experts in a field with 25 years experience who never seem to get past that feeling – and so they feel that every talk is a new talk and they never move on and keep repeating the same pattern.
So in a nutshell, presentation anxiety comes from a bad pre-talk routine. The key is to make it a more positive routine and find the best ways to calm yourself down to perform well on the day – with some butterflies in your stomach, but like I said, getting them to fly in formation.
Hope that helps. It’s a fascinating subject.
miketheschwartz:
Thank you for your generosity and time in explaining that in depth. It surely is a fascinating topic.
Curious – do you find performance anxiety in folks you help often stems from other areas of their life? It’s refreshing to hear you say performance anxiety can be tracked back to a previous moment in that person’s life, earlier in their career or in grade school… and do you ever notice the person may be carrying the weight from a narrative they’ve yet to address from another area of their life?
leejackson:
Hi @michaelschwartz.co – I forgot to post this earlier. Here is a free 9-minute video on Presentation Anxiety from my online course. “Most audiences actually want us to succeed, so shifting perspective helps reduce anxiety.”
Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzK35sap_jU
Want more on presentation skills and managing anxiety?
Visit https://www.leejackson.org/links or grab a copy of Get Good at Presenting at the same link.
